jonesy’s rhino

The zoo is fucking great. Well, everything but the monkeys. I fucking can’t stand monkeys. I mean, they’re just so fucking lame. What, I’m supposed to be impressed because they can climb trees well and throw shit around? Fat chance. So yeah, I pretty much hate monkeys. Jonesy hated monkeys too, and it was shit like that that made us pals, you know? But Jonesy died. What a drag.

Well, on the day Jonesy died, me and him were at the zoo. We’d been kicking around and drinking and carrying on like assholes pretty much all day. Pretty standard zoo stuff—for us anyway.

Once we were pretty sloshed, I went over to the camel corral and met my buddy Roy. Roy is a real cool dude. He runs the camel corral, which is this big fenced off area where all the camels chill out. I got my picture taken with the camel for like the sixteenth time. The camel photo turned out pretty bad ass, and I was really stoked. See, the camel is my favorite animal. I can’t explain it really—I just love camels. They’re fucking cool. I mean, I can sit and just chill at the camel corral all day. I wish the camels could hang out. I’d love to share a few beers with them. But anyway, yeah, I was pretty stoked because my camel photo turned out pretty sick. Jonesy, on the other hand, was absolutely rotten dogshit miserable.

See, there was no rhinoceros at the zoo that day. Usually there’s a rhino, this big, old, ugly-ass rhino with a broken stump of a horn, but the rhino was gone. The rhino habitat was totally empty. There was just a massive, stinking rhino shit on the ground and a sign that said “sorry, the rhino is closed today.” Well Jonesy was seriously bummed out about the missing rhino. He took it real hard. See, just like the camel is my favorite animal, that mangy, beat-up rhino was pretty much his number one favorite animal, and if there wasn’t gonna be any rhino at the zoo, then, well, Jonesy just wanted nothing to do with the Zoo or any of the other animals. So Jonesy was miserable, and he got drunk, drunker that usual—he drank like he meant it.

I was a bit worried about Jonesy, but I was the wrong sort of worried. I was worried that he might piss his pants or fall asleep someplace or get sick or do something kind of megacrude or unsavory. I just didn’t wanna get banned from the zoo, you know? I love the zoo! So the degree of Jonesy’s craziness, it sort of caught me off guard, and when we were hanging out by the bears, I was as surprised as everybody else when, out of nowhere, Jonesy hopped over the fence of the bear habitat. Seriously! Jonesy was a spry little dude.

Once Jonesy was inside the bear habitat, he walked up to the biggest bear in the group really super-casual-like, and he punched it square in the face. Well the bear was pretty startled. I mean, bears don’t get punched in the face that often, right? Hell no. And there’s a reason: bears are badass animals. They will fuck your shit up. But when Jonesy gets drunk and fired up, it doesn’t matter how loud anyone shouts at him—he won’t listen to reason.

After punching the bear, Jonesy looked that fucking bear right in the eyes and started blabbering like an asshole. He was all “I seen what you done in the television. I know your kind. With all the fur. Catching salmon in the river and shit like that. You think you’re such hot shit. With your cubs. You go around and climb trees and swim and shit in the fucking woods. I know your fucking deal! But you’re no rhinoceros! You ain’t never gonna be no fucking rhinoceros! So why don’t you fucking cut this shit out. Go home. Go back to your fucking cave in the woods. And stay there. No one wants to hear about you, your fucking hibernation, your honey, and whatever the fuck else you do. I’m sick of your garbage. Bring back the fucking rhinoceros you piece of shit.” Then, when his rant was over, Jonesy reeled back and swung his fist at the bear again. This time, however, he totally missed and fell on the ground. Well, the ground was pretty muddy, so Jonesy fell in a big heap of mud. This made him even angrier. All fucking covered in mud, Jonesy thrashed around for a while cursing and swearing vengeance upon the bear.

By this point the bear was visibly irritated. It had this really incredulous look on its face. I was actually pretty stunned by this look. I mean, I was used to Jonesy being a fucking moron dipshit asshole, so him leaping into the bear cage, punching a bear in the face, falling into some mud, and then cursing the fucking bear out—this shit really came as no surprise at all. But the incredulous look the bear’s face? It was stunningly real. I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that bear knew exactly what was going on. And it was getting sick of it.

Jonesy, meanwhile, was too busy being pissed off on account of the mud to realize how pissed off the bear was. “You got your mud all over my fucking shirt!” He said. “Ain’t no fucking bear gonna make me look an asshole. You think cause you got your mud and your cave and your tire swing that you’re some fucking hot shit zoo fucking superstar, but you know what?…” Jonesy got up close to the bear’s ear as if he was going to whisper something quiet, and then, as loud as he could, he yelled “…you ain’t half a fucking rhinoceros!”

Well yelling in the bear’s ear was an absolutely terrible idea. That shit really sparked a fire under the bear. It produced some serious rage. And not just any rage. Fucking bear rage. And I think maybe, maybe for about a nanosecond, Jonesy sobered up and realized what the fuck he’d done. I really think I saw it in his eyes. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to do shit about it. He was all done. It took all of maybe five seconds for the bear to put Jonesy out of business. Then that bear laid a fucking bite on him. Oh man, that shit was bleak. Realy ugly. Sorta makes me sick just thinking about it. You ever seen a fucking heated bear lay a serious raging fucking bear bite on someone? I mean this thing, this fucking enormous beast, it was furious, absolutely furious, and it fucked little Jonesy up. It used its paws, its teeth, its feet, and every muscle in its enormous body. It tore, pulled, ripped, smashed, crushed—that bear just absolutely ruined Jonesy. It smashed him. It fucking eliminated him.

Anyway, the bear killed poor Jonesy fucking dead as they come. Like fucking science fiction dead. Video game dead. Roy, the dude who runs the camel corral, said the folks at the Zoo spent about a month cleaning pieces of Jonesy outta the bear’s teeth, fur, and paws. Brutal. But anyway, that’s how Joesy died. Poor Jonesy. He was a good dude. I still go to the zoo lots. A few months after Jonesy got shredded, I met this hypercute Belarussian chick by the hyena cage, and we hang out lots. Hyenas are a pretty badass animal. I mean, they ain’t camels, but they’re way the fuck cooler than monkeys. I fucking can’t stand monkeys.

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LYNCH 2009